Feature Film Made In GTA IV

from the film-world-is-changing dept

Nearly a decade ago, we talked about how the concept of machinima was becoming more mainstream, and plenty has happened since then. People have made all sorts of cool stuff within video games. Slashdot points us to a short blog post by someone pointing out how it's becoming cheaper than ever to make movies these days, and points out a few great examples. The first one is a feature-length film made entirely in GTA IV. Stupidly, we can't embed it here, because apparently there's a Universal Music song in there, and Universal is requiring that the video only be shown on YouTube, so that it can monetize it. It seems pretty ridiculous that Universal would get the only money from YouTube on a 90-minute film.

Separately, that original blog post has a short film made for $300 that has pretty damn impressive special effects for that little money:

Of course, we've seen cheap movies made with great special effects before, but every year the quality gets better and better and better. Remember a similar story from a little over a year ago? We're going to be seeing more and more and more like this. We've talked a lot lately, wondering when the first feature film will be made with a smartphone, but it's not just the camera equipment. What's fascinating is that so many aspects of filmmaking are becoming cheaper and reaching a much larger community of people. Yes, this will mean plenty of "crappy" movies are made, but it also opens up the possibility that a fantastically great movie can come from totally unexpected places, with incredibly low budgets. Those who don't realize just how disruptive this can be aren't paying close enough attention.

What I find ironic is that this is a $300 movie for a bunch of reasons, the biggest one being the very method of paying for software / movies / music that the whole piracy / give it free movement is trying to rip down.

How else could they afford the software to do this for effectively nothing?

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The cost doesn't factor in the price of the machine to edit/render the footage, the price of the software for special effects, and the camera. Lets say they had a Macbook, $2000, and they used final cut pro $800, and they used FXhome Visionlab for the special effects $500. Lastly the camera,a decent HD for $1000. That is $4300 right there.

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Lets say they used a PC for $1000 and open source to produce everything, plus a DSR camera that goes for about $2000, plus illumination and greenscreen from Walmart $300 that is a $3300 bucks right there still a bargain don't you think?

That ignoring that PC's are not bought for film production exclusively and nor is the digital cameras and assuming they did go to the high end of the spectrum which is unlikely the price comes down if the camera used was a simple digital one without any great features that you can buy for around $100, I did motion tracking in cheap digital cameras is not that hard.

Anyone with a computer and a camera any camera can do some beautiful things today.

Also machinima is getting better everyday the one reason for that is that the graphics are getting better and better all the time so people get an entire environment to use that is already done and they mostly need to worry just about the dialogues. If anybody has seen the latest games like Metal Gear, Silent Hill 8 or Resident Evil they would have noticed how good the graphics are today and the stories are getting compelling with John Carpenter being one of the contributors to Dead Space 2 or something like that.

Instead of just watching a movie you can now interact with the thing, who wants to seat there and watch something for 2 hours when they can get inside and explore?

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You forgot probably 300-500 hours of work that they are doing for "free" but in normal terms would add a ton of money to the project. It's a $300 project because they aren't considering their time has any value.

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You are blinded by the inflexibility of the capitalistic doctrine that permeates our lives today. Money is ONE motivator, but historically need, idleness and serendipity were the main drivers of creation.

So, is it so inconceivable that talented/knowledgeable people are dedicating their valuable time to create something of value that they'll give away, simply because they derive pleasure from creating?

It's the same kind of motivation that keeps Wikipedia and open source going, which appears not to be in short supply on the internet.

I find it quite fascinating tbh: creators are connecting and self-organising online, and in many cases they are actively competing against established companies. Art is also catching up, and perhaps in the near future we'll see feature films with CGI produced entirely by a distributed team of volunteers...

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My time as a volunteer would be valuable yes. But I can't put a price on it. You can't say, I worked x amount of hours on it, and my hourly rate would've been xyz, if you're doing something voluntarily.

So how much money would you add to the tally of $300, if the people worked on the project for free, because they loved to do it?

And I'm thinking they already had the software on their computers, either from school or such, so that doesn't count towards the cost.

BTW, why ARE we discussing how understated the costs are on these kinds of movies.
Bottom line is, you don't need a trillion dollar budget to make a decent movie. SFX don't need to cost that much, I mean my jaw hit the floor when they showed Mel's special ability, the only seemingly wobbly thing was the floating arrow. THAT's the disruptor in this case.

I think the point here is that technology has been the biggest barrier and now these tools are available to people who want to work tirelessly for free. When a $2500 costumer SLR camera is outputting footage that is virtually indistinguishable from a 35mm paniflex or arri camera that costs $1000 a day to rent, the industry dynamics shift wildly

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"Why do we need money, commerce, or corporations again?"

My response was to point out that the argument that this person probably spent more money on this video than what MM says isn't an argument for patents and copy protection laws, it's an argument against them.

There are many other reasons why we don't need patents and copyrights and no reason why we need them, at least the way they are set up today.

That sucked!

Of all the cheap movies made in someone's bedroom this is the worst yet. The effects were that bad. But these guys need a story. Someone people write them a movie to make and find some half decent drama students to act in it.

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Given our broken system, those who host the software or the software developers of this software will probably get sued for patent infringement or something, not that patents were needed for this software to have been developed.

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"It isn't a question of money as motivation, it's the question of being honest about the cost of time, and the cost of actually making the movie."

Despite the old saying that "money is time," time only has a monetary cost if you put a price on it. I, like many others on the internet, don't mind donating some of my free time for free to improve a distributed project. If you think about it, even YOU are using up your time posting comments on a forum -- will you be sending Mike an IOU?

"Really, it has already happened. But you didn't hear about it."

Very probably true, however like I said I've yet to hear of such a project competing with the established players (THAT I would have heard, I think).

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"What I find ironic is that this is a $300 movie for a bunch of reasons, the biggest one being the very method of paying for software / movies / music that the whole piracy / give it free movement is trying to rip down.

How else could they afford the software to do this for effectively nothing?"

I really should not feed the trolls. Or defend something that doesn't require it, but what the hell.

Wait wait wait... some guy spends the time to edit a 90 minute film, GTA is used as the base technology, people lend their voices to the project, etc, etc, etc... but there's 1 song that Universal Music holds the copyright on, so they're the only ones allowed to make money from it?

Takes time for paradigms to change

Some people say free entertainment will never eliminate movie studios and record companies because the quality of the material will never measure up. That reasoning didn't save ocean liners when trans-Atlantic air travel came along. But suppose steamship lines and railroads had acquired control over travel the way entertainment companies are now trying to get control of the Internet. We could be living in a world where few people questioned the idea that they had to travel by ship or train. They would be secure in the belief that airplanes were only safe for cargo, and scientists and engineers who argued otherwise would be branded as Liberal Atheists trying to lead us to One World Government. I'm sure Fox News could muster up a stable of experts who could prove with simple diagrams and good ole common sense that moving faster than 100 mph would kill you.

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Some people say free entertainment will never eliminate movie studios and record companies because the quality of the material will never measure up.

I would ask those people why. Photography is no longer the realm of professionals, millions of amateurs know are able not only to take good shots, but to use tools effectively to create things, the Gimp can not only retouch photographs it can create a whole bunch of effects and can be used extensively in professional work(e.g. The 300 movie is one example of that). Thousands of sound engineers and musicians have access to open source easy tools that can do almost anything you can imagine, so sound and music can also be done by amateurs today on the pro level, now is happening to video, the quality may be poor today, but probably won't stay that way forever, on the technical level people can do almost anything any big production can already with budgets that would be laughed at by the big boys, but they shouldn't this means they will soon have to compete not with piracy but with free open good enough products that may hit the market in a decade or so as more and more people realize they don't need others to tell stories they can tell those stories themselves and have the means today to do it on the cheap end of the scale to a level that rivals professional productions. The only thing that amateurs don't have yet is an idea of what it is needed to accomplice good story telling and they are learning fast. The internet enables people to learn things in a fraction of the time it took the movie and TV industries to realize their protocols. 5 years ago amateur film making was a hobby thing, that only your parents could be proud of, today you get people saying "Wow! that is amazing dude!" and it is opening a market to smaller competitors to get a foot in, but that is not the only factor, a lot of people are angry with those people for doing what they are doing to the population and are scrambling to find alternatives, the fight on piracy actually may create a market that could destroy the very people that believe in enforcement to sell anything. Crazy I know, but once you look at how the software industry reacted and what came out of that you would respect more that kind of reasoning, open source didn't came about because it was not needed it came about because of a very deep frustration with the players and what they were doing and what that was teaching others to do. some may believe, it can't happen to them, well push other harder enough and tell will go for the alternatives illegal initially, and legal right after.

On a completely different note, I found this video on Youtube about the Science of Watchmen, this little video shows a physics professor that uses super heroes to explain physical phenomenon and bypass one of the number one problems in teaching today, transferring the sense of utility of that knowledge to the group, thus creating the necessary drive for it to happen in a fluid, productive way.

Hope he does not get sued for infringement or have to pay royalties to all the studios and publishers out there so he can teach something, after all he is stealing the work of others to incorporate in his on.

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What I find ironic is that this is a $300 movie for a bunch of reasons, the biggest one being the very method of paying for software / movies / music that the whole piracy / give it free movement is trying to rip down.

How else could they afford the software to do this for effectively nothing?

Wrong wrong wrong again.

There is plenty of open source software around for doing this stuff.

Without the existence of copyrighted software there would be even more.

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5 years ago amateur film making was a hobby thing, that only your parents could be proud of,

Actually amateur film making has always been better than this - many well known names in the cinema started as amateurs. Two that spent a long time as amateurs before becoming part of the professional cinema are Ken Russell and Warwick Davis.

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No different than the thousands of people who work "deferred" each year on a indie films hoping to get paid on the "next" gig or to have this one make money later.

Myself included. And I've actually made AND sold two independent feature films, spending cumulatively about 6 years of my life on them, and while they did return the investors $$$, I never made a cent off them - including never recouping my own deferred salary as a producer.

Worth it? Not really.

I would have far rather have made a $3-5K feature than $100k - at least the odds (if all my clearances are in order) on making an actual profit are far better at that cost level.

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It's too bad for you that you weren't able to execute a profitable business model. However, society benefited quite a bit from you putting in all those long hours for free, so this is a good thing we should celebrate. The fact that you were willing to put in so much for so little in return bodes very well for the future of moviemaking, which will be largely predicated on this large untapped pool of people who will work hard for only the thinnest promise of a tangible reward.

Besides which, everyone knows that all artists who are paid for their work do shitty work anyway. Name one paid artist who is better at his or her job than any random amateur doing it from the heart. Can't do it, can you?